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BYELORUSSIA'
SOVIET'
Present-day
SOCIALIST
boundaries
REPUBLIC~.
POLAND
/
About A.D. 1400
A battleground for
heathen souls in the
13th century, the
northern Baltic
region was a loose
confederation ruled
over by bishops and
German knights, the
vanguard of Chris
tian imperialism in
the Baltic. The most
powerful Baits, Lith
uanians extended
their rule south as
far as the distant
Black Sea.
1569
After two centuries
of sharing mon
archs, Lithuania and
Poland in 1569
joined in formal
commonwealth.
Present-day Latvia,
known then as Livo
nia, was the scene
of recurrent strug
gles between
Germans, Russians,
and Swedes.
1721
After Peter the
Great's victory over
Sweden, Russia
assumed control
over the northern
Baltics. With the dis
solution of the Com
monwealth in 1795,
Lithuania and the
Duchy of Courland
also fell to Russia.
Though the landed
German and Polish
nobility prospered
under Russian rule,
a century of serfdom
ensued for Baltic
peasants.
1938
On the eve of war,
the Baltics had been
free for 20 years.
After World War II
East Prussia, a rem
nant of 19th-century
Germany, was split
between Poland and
the U.S .S.R . The
latter part became
the Kaliningrad
oblast of the
Russian Republic.
Ironically, art and literature were at a stand
still. "Only some idiots like me are still writing
novels," said Estonian novelist Jaan Kross.
"All the others are writing for newspapers."
"Or running the governments," added
Kross's wife, Ellen Niit, an author of chil
dren's books.
"What about the communist writers?"
"They were dead already," she said.
Communist youth groups such as Pioneers
and Komsomol were finished among Balts.
Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, whose lead
ers had been jailed or executed in 1940, were
revived. Estonia's first YMCA since before
the war was being organized by Ullar Kerde,
an intense young man with a wiry crew cut and
a whistle around his neck. "This has to be a
voluntary organization," he told me.
"We
have enough angry young men. In our sports
schools everything is forced. You must do
sports. You must do, you must learn. It blunts
the kids."
Kerde has already taken his boys basketball
team to Finland and plans a trip to the United
States. "They will actually have seen, with
their own eyes, a basketball game in Madison
Square Garden, New York, the United States
of America!
"Our children lack civilization," he said.
"They have been raised as savages. I want to
plant a seed in these boys-from them the
future of this country will grow. For that, I
am willing to spend sleepless nights and work
myself to the bone. I do it for Estonia, for that
principle alone."
After the political euphoria in the winter of
1989-1990, when glasnostspurred dissent and
courage, ordinary citizens returned to the
i
K~ .k
E.i
iii
j
)